Table of Contents
Symbiosis is a system that helps in the day to day tasks involved in administration of a typical server on the internet. Its goal is to simplify running web and email hosting across multiple, separate domains, along with all their associated services.
Specifically, Symbiosis handles
Currently Symbiosis packages are available for installation on Debian GNU/Linux.
No. All typical day-to-day jobs, such as adding new web sites, or email addresses, or uploading content, can be done using SFTP, i.e. FTP over SSH, by creating files and directories. FileZilla is the recommended program for this.
This should not be viewed as a disadvantage; any confident computer user should be able to manage a Symbiosis system. Effort has been put into making the layout of the various systems as obvious as possible, and making systems just work.
Symbiosis has been written by an experienced team of developers and system administrators with the goal of having an easy-to-use hosting system that met their exacting standards.
Unlike other control panel systems, one of the aims of the Symbiosis system is to keep the "magic" as transparent as possible. As far as possible standard tools and techniques have been used to configure the various services on a Symbiosis system. This allows users to tailor these configurations as they need, as well as working through standard distribution updates and upgrades.
Yes! Symbiosis is both Free Software and Open Source software. All the parts Bytemark have written have been released under the GNU General Public Licence, version 2 or later, or the Apache licence, version 2.0. All the source code is available for scrutiny on the Symbiosis project site. There is also a issue tracker to report any problems encountered, or to request improvements.
This documentation is released under the GNU Free Documentation Licence or later. It also has a project site, and issue tracker.
Symbiosis uses the following software, all of which is open-source:
PHP 5.4 scripting language, with the following modules
What follows is step by step instructions to get up and running with controlling your server and setting up core services. The screen shots are taken from a Windows system, but all the programs used are also available for Mac OS X and GNU/Linux desktop systems.
Throughout the documentation, the example server used is example.vm.bytemark.co.uk. The example domain used is my-brilliant-site.com. These should be substituted as appropriate.